At dusk on a summer’s evening in
the year 795 AD, a sinister looking high-prowed ship ploughed into the sands at
Lambay Island just north of Howth Head on the east coast of Ireland near
Dublin. Immediately from the body of the Longboat, the oarsmen rushed to attack
the monastery of Saint Columkill. They slaughtered the monks, plundered the monastery
for for all the gold and silver vessels they could find, and then disappeared
back into the Irish Sea. The Irish Annalists, referring to the incident,
describe the unwelcome arrivals as "dubh-ghaill".

The first "Doyles" had arrived in Ireland!

This was the beginning of more than two centuries of
attack and invasion which had devastating effect on Ireland, and on the Irish
monasteries in particular

Members of Clan Doyle /Clann O DubhGhaill
("Dubh-Ghaill" ... pronounced "Du-Gall") take their family
surname from the Irish Gaelic words meaning "Dark/Evil Foreigner";
and this is just what the indigenous Celts called the Danish Vikings who
started settling in Ireland and Scotland more than 1,000 years ago.

In Ireland, the annalists distinguished two groups
among the raiding Vikings, the Lochlainn, or Norwegians, and the Danair, or
Danes, the Norwegians being described as fair, the Danish as dark (because they
wore chain-mail armour). Initially, the Norwegians dominated, and their raids
were sporadic and unsystematic. From about 830, however a new phase of
large-scale attacks, involving the use of fleets of long-ships, began, and the
Vikings penetrated deep inland though the use of rivers and lakes. Attracted by
the wealth of the monasteries and churches they plundered them steadily. From
this period date the first Vikings' fortified settlements. In 852, the Danes
wrested control of one of these settlements, the military and trading post of
Dublin, from the Norwegians under their king Olaf (in Irish Amlaoimh), and
founded the Danish Kingdom of Dublin which was to last three hundred years,
until the coming of the Anglo-Normans.